[spoiler]I really, really doubt that he committed suicide. For one thing, it’s a children’s movie. For another thing, he put on a breathing mask. Also he was talking to people off camera and the implication was pretty clear that they were leaving in a ship.
I also didn’t get any feeling that people had been left behind. With all the talk of daily departing ships, with the guy talking about the planet being evacuated, and with there being no sign of people having tried to keep surviving, and no signs of dead people, and again, it being a children’s movie, I think that they intended that the people all left.[/spoiler]
I have to admit, there’s one thing that really bugged me about the movie:
The giant trash compactor room on the Axiom, where they jettison their waste into space. They’ve been up there for seven hundred years, and they’re firing enormous trash cubes into the vacuum every five minutes? Where are they getting all the raw material to generate that much trash in the first place? The ship ain’t that big!
I believe they had been in space for about 600 hundred years, so I don’t really think there’s any mystery about the fate of the CEO…if he was there during the evacuation, I assume he’s long since died (remember, the captain was also, IIRC, the sixth captain of the ship).
The directive for the auto pilot was sent out 700 years before the current date in the movie. It is not known how long before the directive was sent that the ship left Earth. It may have been that ships such as that had been living off in space for generations already by that time.
Yea, I assume he was dead, but I meant more if he was able to make it to another ship and live there the rest of the natural life, or if he died shortly after making that message.
And yea, I assumed there could be other ships, who knows if they would eventually return (or if their Autos would succeed and then make them remain in space forever).
Ha! I can easily beat that. Japan gets movies absolute last in the industrial world, and after quite a few of the developing countries too. Release date here: December 20th.
We got Fellowship of the Rings over 14 months after it was first released in the UK. Funny how when it’s a big Sony Pictures distribution though, or even something a little less blockbustery, it gets out at almost exactly the same time as the rest of the world.
Some of the smaller movies get no release, or some nominal release like Cashback (retitled as the katakana rendition of “Frozen Time” here) which was released (almost two years after its premiere) in something like 4 or 5 cinemas in Tokyo for a very limited time. One theater in my area, one of the few outside Tokyo to show it, had it for a grand total of five weekdays. Yep, Monday to Friday, two showings a day, then gone. Why even bother? It was basically impossible for me to see it in the theater.
I am looking forward to seeing Wall*E when it finally does get here. Of Pixar films, the only one I’ve been somewhat meh about seeing was Cars. And even that wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as great as most of their other movies.
I’ll think a bit before ranking it against Pixar’s other efforts, but although more than a bit derivative I quite enjoyed it, and thought from an aesthetic standpoint it was one of the most beautiful films I’d ever seen. The rather glaring contrast between the live-action and animated humans took me out of it a bit but I thought the story overall was interesting and really well-structured. Loved how well thought-out the roles, methods of operation and behavior of the various service robots was. Aside from the various sci-fi references, a lot of the film, especially in the early going, had the feel of Jacque Tati’s classic near-silent comedies.
BTW, after all the talk about the supposed resemblance between Wall-e and Johnny Five, I’m a bit surprised that no one here, or in the first 3 or 4 pages of comments I read on IMDB, seems to have picked up on how much of the visual look (of the scenes set on Earth), and elements of the plot, resemble that of Mike Judge’s famously suppressed (and IMO brilliant) Idiocracy. I’m aware that initial development of this film apparently long pre-dates the latter, yet there seem too many parallels for this to be purely coincidental.
Oh, and I want to throw out major props to ‘Presto’, the opening short: a fabulous riff on the old Looney Toons, if you ask me.
Just saw it tonight at a theatre that was relatively crowded for a Tuesday 9 PM showing. The crowd loved it, and so did I. I caught a bunch of references, but i get the feeling that there are dozens more that I will catch on rewatching. Not only did I get a Idiocracy vibe from the look of earth, but from the fate of the humans on the Axiom. Not saying it was a rip off in any way, just two good movies that mined similar ideas.
I loved it. It had humor, drama, and tension. The design, as usual, was incredible. And, some scenes were truly breathtaking. It is amazing how consistent Pixar can be with beautiful innovative animation. They don’t cut corners. This carries over to the stories, as well. I think the lack of dialog was able to truly make the story shine.
Jeff Garlin was well cast as the captain. He had a small role and made the most of it. I have to admit that the live action elements did take me out of the film for a bit. I got used to them, eventually and it worked just fine. I do wonder what the motivation for using them was.
As far as ranking it goes. I have no idea. It was great and I enjoyed it. I can say that about all of Pixar.
I was a little bit disappointed that there wasn’t a trailer for the next Pixar film. I seem to remember seeing teasers for Wall E before Rattatouile, and a teaser for Ratatouille before The Incredibles.
Oh. Presto was so good. A definite throwback to Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies/Walter Lantz 40s cartoon style with some fun additions of their own.
I was the only Mac user in that entire theater (My husband and daughter, while they recognized the sound from hearing my machine, both use PC’s themselves.) I did hear someone laugh the second time he started up near the end of the movie, so maybe another Mac user came in late.
So, why was this Wall-E still chugging along when all the others had “died” long ago? That was never really explained. Presumably, others could have repaired themselves as well. So, why didn’t they? And if Wall-E could repair himself, why couldn’t he have repaired other Wall-E’s?
Presumably somewhere along the line they started sending out bots to recycle the cubes. Of course, that raises the question of why continue sending out the cubes. A 700 year old habit would be really hard to break and putting them off the ship would be easier on their minds. Would you eat something if you knew it had been recycled from garbage?
Upon reflection, I think it was an artistic mistake to use real people in the video recordings.
Look, it’s pointless to point out logical flaws.
Obviously, you wouldn’t be throwing away huge amounts of compacted stuff from a self-sustaining 700-year-old generation ship. (Though not technically a generation ship, come to think of it, since it has FTL. More like a space colony that can also go places.)
And the basic premise doesn’t make sense; no matter how much junk accumulated, it’d be vastly eaiser to keep living on Earth and clean things up than to move the population into space.
Doesn’t matter; it’s one of those movies that don’t make a lick of sense logically, but work as fairy tales.
